Episode 19: Meet the chef teaching a connected oven how to cook

This week’s podcast explores how sausage gets made. Actually we explore how roast chickens, cookies and salmon get made. Ryan Baker is the research chef at June, a company making a $1,500 connected oven. When he’s not appearing on the IoT podcast he spends his days baking 15 batches of cookies or 20 batches of salmon trying to figure out how to train the artificial intelligence inside the June oven how to build recipes for certain types of food. It sounds like an amazing job, and he’s in a prime position to explain how technology and food prep can come together to change how people learn how to cook and how the internet of things might invade the kitchen.

Ryan Baker, research chef at June.
Ryan Baker, research chef at June.

Before we talk to Baker about how he controls his June ovens at the command line, Kevin Tofel and I discuss Google’s stunning corporate restructuring and what it means for Nest and Google’s Brillo and Weave plans. We also talk about a few examples of the smart home still being a little bit dumb, and some fall out on the security from the Black Hat security conference. On the gadget front, D-Link has a new $60 Wi-Fi water sensor and Kevin reviews the $15 connected Cree LED light bulbs.

Hosts: Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Tofel
Guest: Ryan Baker, June

  • Nest is an Alphabet company now, but where are Brillo and Weave?
  • Post-vacation blues in the smart home
  • ZigBee was hacked and here’s a device that could crack your car or garage for $30
  • How should we connect the kitchen?
  • It takes a lot of batches of salmon and roast chickens to teach an oven how to be smart

Published by

Stacey Higginbotham

I am a journalist who has covered technology for over a decade at publications such as Fortune, PCMag, Gigaom, The Deal and BusinessWeek.